1. Industrial Field of Utilization
The present invention relates to an electronic musical apparatus having a function for limiting the use of music contents such as style data and song data loaded in the electronic musical apparatus such as an electronic musical instrument, and a program for use in the electronic musical apparatus.
2. Prior Art
In conventional electronic musical instruments, many music contents such as style data for automatic accompaniment are preloaded in ROM (Read Only Memory).
The automatic accompaniment is a function for allowing an electronic musical instrument to accomplish automatic performance of accompaniment parts only by designating chords on a keyboard. For the automatic accompaniment, various automatic accompaniment patterns suited to various kinds of music scenes such as Pops, Jazz, Latin, and dance music are prepared.
The term “style data” denotes pattern performance data on the above-mentioned accompaniment styles. Each pattern performance data consists of one or more measures or bars. The pattern performance data is read out from the memory based on a user-selected accompaniment style and is repeatedly reproduced to continue the automatic accompaniment.
For each rhythm style, pattern data on chord backing and bass tones are stored while the fundamental note of the chord is set to C, so that the read-out pattern data are converted in pitch as appropriate based on chord information or the like supplied by user's input of performance or the like. The pitch-converted pattern data are sent to a tone generator to generate a tone.
In the electronic musical instruments, many music contents such as song data for automatic performance, registration data, and timbre data for the tone generator (data for waveform synthesis) are also preloaded in ROM (Read Only Memory) in addition to the above-mentioned style data.
The registration data is data for establishing the settings of many setting operators on an operation panel by one operation in a certain kind of electronic musical instrument. In general, groups of multiple settings are prepared, so that the user selects and reads out a group of settings as appropriate while playing on the keyboard, thereby changing the settings on the operation panel in a batch operation.
The style data, song data, registration data, and timbre data stored in the ROM are loaded into a working memory, and edited according to user preferences. The edited data are stored in a flexible magnetic disk in the electronic musical instrument or transferred to a personal computer connected to the electronic musical instrument.
The user can use the above-mentioned original music contents and edited music contents obtained from the original music contents as appropriate in the “range of personal use.” However, depending on the manner by which the user uses the music contents, the user may copy into the flexible magnetic disk the original music contents preloaded in the factory-shipped ROM as they are without being edited, and in some cases, the music contents may be distributed via communication networks. Electronic musical instrument makers enable users to use and edit music contents at their pleasure in the “range of personal use” in view of convenience of user's creative activities. However, since the editing function can make it easy to substantially copy the original music contents, an infringement of a copyright may occur.
This makes them impossible to protect the copyright and to provide an electronic musical instrument with excellent features of loaded music contents.